


And All The People, Players

by Copper_Nails (Her_Madjesty)



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types
Genre: Canon Compliant, Character Study, F/M, Gen, M/M, Music
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-05
Updated: 2018-01-05
Packaged: 2019-02-28 20:42:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,491
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13279497
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Her_Madjesty/pseuds/Copper_Nails
Summary: The Force is orchestral, choral, music, and its chosen are the only ones to hear its tune.





	And All The People, Players

**Author's Note:**

> There is a meta running around Tumblr that proposes that Force users in the Star Wars universe are just people who can hear the Star Wars soundtrack. I wanted to explore that idea, and thus have presented to you seven Force touched folks and their interaction with the Force's orchestra. 
> 
> This fic is written in a Chaucerian format as proposed by anghraine on Tumblr; each of the seven sections is composed of seven sentences, as proposed in the original challenge, issued [here](http://anghraine.tumblr.com/post/145320294168/chaucer-meme).
> 
> Side note: I know this is a pretentious piece of work, but 2k18 is the year of self indulgence. Have fun.

I. Luke Skywalker

When he meets Old Ben, the buzzing in his ears turns into music, but Luke finds that he is as familiar with the orchestra of the Force as he is with the sound of his own breath; it lingers on the back of his tongue like lactose and the water wrenched out of Tatooine’s atmosphere. The Force swells in his breast and makes his hands twitch; its minor chords drive him back to his uncle’s farm; lures him into Mos Eisley’s cantina; threatens to swallow him whole the moment he sets foot on Dagobah.

The music, though, when he recognizes his father, doesn’t play out in pounding timpani or bellowing trombone. It warms his skin like the twin sunset on Tatooine. Luke looks into the reflections of Darth Vader’s mask, and he screams, because comfort in the bowels of Cloud City, with a cauterized hand – it is sugar and savor and salt; it is minor chords in glass-shattered harmony.

(His father’s death is nothing more than the crackle of flesh and fire, because Anakin Skywalker’s music dies along with him. Luke clings to this sizzle, in his later years, when he deafens himself with guilt; it is somehow preferable in the face of overwhelming silence.)

 

II. Rey of Jakku

Jakku makes music of its machinery. Rey dances to its drum line, scavenging corpses of metal and flesh alike. When she trades desert thunder for the angles of the Millennium Falcon, the beat reaches out and pulls at her gut; it is the Force, yes, but wrapped in unfamiliar composition; no longer conducted by survival but by growth in major rains; in the gentlest of percussion.

Kylo Ren, when she meets him, sings in a terrible baritone, but the noise of him adds inflection to each of her new phrases, and instead of observer, dancer, she lends a guiding meter to the influx of music in her body and lets it play with his; lets it grow spines and crescendo until their tunes are so interwoven that it hurts for his injured tones to go silent, hurts like sweet relief.

(She cries herself to sleep listening to the pulse of the Force, its metronome offbeat without her old, familiar pulse.)

She lets Leia try and teach her the same syncopation they both know her son’s perfected, but neither General nor the lost Jedi Knight can make the noise in her head make sense. Rey reaches out and touches the flush of notes with her fingers and cannot tell where she is meant to stand: on a pedestal, singing, or in the pit with her drums.

 

III. Chirrut Imwe (and Baze Malbus)

Jedha nurtures its poets and musicians, even in the grips of the Empire, and in doing so, turns the Force into its own sort of echolocation. Chirrut walks through the Guardians’ temple and listens to the kyber hum beneath his feet. The sound tastes of ice in the dry heat of the desert; it offers relief from the stench of fuel and sweat. In his pacing, in the market, in the moments he is freest, Chirrut sings back, tracing out the chorus of the crystal with his tongue until Baze smacks him upside the head with a touch too gentle to be admonishing.

(Baze knows he has forsaken that old, flute-throated sound, and the smack only comes when the stormtroopers lurch too close and Chirrut decides to pretend that he is deaf as well as blind. When they are safe, in the market or on a ship next to Jyn, her necklace pulsing, Baze closes his eyes and lets Chirrut sing to him of a Force he does not believe in but once knew the taste of.)

(In the softest moments, the ones they remember at the end, the men lean against one another and allow the song tucked in the cradle of Jyn’s throat to hold the both of them.)

 

IV. Leia Organa

There is fire beneath her tongue, the first time Leia tastes the Force; fire and betrayal and grief, low in her stomach, all the better for amplifying Luke’s lonely solo so that it can pierce her like a blaster bolt from a damned bounty hunter’s barrel. Lando turns the Millennium Falcon back to the seat of his cowardliness at her Force-ladened command, and Leia pretends that she doesn’t hear trombones in her head; a chorus she refuses to acknowledge as the dark Darth Vader’s.

(It is Luke, who, in old age, tells her that she sounds like their father, buried in the tendrils of an intergalactic orchestra. Leia slaps him.)

It comes and goes, her grasp of the music, too stifled beneath her skin, but Leia learns it as she can. The quartets in the seats of Imperial power sound tinkling, imitative, like false champagne at the end of a war.

Still, Leia drinks, knowing that she has earned every bubbling rendition.

 

V. Lyra Erso

She knows the key of the earth’s shivers. Lyra, before she becomes an Erso, walks through caverns and clutches the kyber crystal around her neck, tracing the taste of ice on her tongue and the latent press of piano in the back of her head. It is elegant in its brokenness, and she longs for it; she dives deeper into the dirt and discovers the crevices that dance with the reverberation of the Force; the leftovers from its spit valves and the broken reeds and the scattered piano wire that it uses to entice the whole of the galaxy.

She pleads her case to the Council of Jedi, but they recognize her wanting and try to mute the music that drips off of her palms. Lyra narrows her eyes at their unified march and retreats, as they request, to her caverns. No matter how hard she tries, though, the Force plucks at its piano keys, and it is a call she cannot deafen herself to.

(Galen Erso does not hear the galaxy’s orchestra, but he finds Lyra dancing, hands outstretched, in a cavern of kyber crystal, and he falls a little bit in love.)

 

VI. Shmi Skywalker Lars

She finds the source of the music one night, in the darkness, pulsing like a heartbeat that she does not recognize. Shmi Skywalker is one of few who gets to see the orchestra in its expanse; each player spreads out in front of her, their voices or their hands or their tongues uplifted as they move through the galaxy.

Shmi looks at the sheet music and cannot read it, but she tries to sing, anyway. The orchestra gathers around her, takes her in its arms, and fills her until the galaxy is nothing, until there is only music and a light buried deep in her belly that leaves her thighs shaking and her ears full of chords.

The quiet of Tatooine, after, hurts her. Shmi wanders through Jedi temples, walks with missionaried Guardians of the Whills, and when they hum or curse or play with the Force, she tries her hardest to hear it call back to them.

She gives birth too early, shrieking as she reaches for the stars.

Her son is born singing. 

 

VII. Anakin Skywalker

Qui-Gon sounds like the bells that ring above the stadium he raced through as a child; tolling, ancient, and always cut off too short, though the echo lasts in the minds of the people and in the canyons on Tattooine.

Coruscant, in comparison, sounds likes –

and Obi-Wan sounds like –

and the council sounds like –

and Ahsoka sounds like –

(too much, too much, too many and too much –)

*

Padm _é_ sounds like the night, almost-but-not-quite silent, and Anakin loves her for it, loves her enough that the Force swells around him and includes her in its symphonies; lets him sense her from across the stars in choruses that are not deafening.

Palpatine is not quiet, but his presence in the Force does wonders for the reverberation; when Anakin sits in his presence, the orchestra comes into focus: Obi-Wan becomes a tenor saxophone; the council a string quartet; Ahsoka sharp and longing like an oboe with a proper reed.

In the end, though, it is the over-stimulation that blinds him. Anakin looks to the council, to Obi-Wan, to Ahsoka, to Padm _é_ and finds that the noise of them cannot be contained on a sheet of music; it is not to be arranged, replayed; to be silenced at their own will, for the Force cannot be silenced, not unless there is death or if it flows through Palpatine or if, in the darkness, it turns from its bright colors and sharp tastes in the cracks of molars into the simmering of warmed caramel, all-consuming like the sun in the desert.

(Yet Darth Vader, in his turning, hears _everything_ , and it is this that is Palpatine’s worst lie; that when the world caves into shadow, there is not silence, but a lacking that screams and screams.)

**Author's Note:**

> Let me know what you thought!


End file.
